By Reverend Laurie DeMott

Before you worry that we are turning all of our children into mad scientists, the reality is that all of us do this particular experiment all of the time, or at least we all eat the results, because the eukaryotic unicellular microorganism I am talking about are yeast. Yeast has the valuable attribute of being able to ferment sugar and so when yeast is given a little warmth and a little sugar to eat, it begins to produce carbon dioxide and ethanol. The carbon dioxide is what puffs up your bread to make it light and tasty (and the ethanol is what makes you a little tipsy if you eat too much unbaked bread dough). Yeast has been part of the baking process throughout human history. The yeast used by women during Jesus’ time may have been a different species of yeast, more akin to the yeast found in sourdough, but its properties were the same – it too produced carbon dioxide and puffed up their bread -- and so for once we do not need any commentaries to help us to understand Jesus’ parable of the leavening of the dough. Unlike our children, we don’t need to go through the process of mixing yeast with flour and watching bread rise in order to understand Jesus’ analogy. We can make the leap from metaphor to lesson. We “get” yeast. We get Jesus’ point that a tiny bit of yeast can result in large round loaves of bread. We get that tiny mustard seeds grow into big shrubs. We get that Jesus is reminding us that big things happen from small starts, that tiny efforts add up to large accomplishments, that a journey of a thousand miles begins with one step. We understand exactly what Jesus is talking about.

It’s just that we’re not sure we really believe it.

I can see the people in that crowd around Jesus nodding their heads in recognition – “Yeah, Jesus, you are right. It’s the little things that count. It’s the tiny steps that matter. Absolutely, you’re right on the money there. Now, when are we going to overthrow the Roman government and fix this mess?”

The Zealots followed Jesus because they believed revolution was in the air and Jesus was about to radically alter the political landscape. The disciples followed Jesus because they believed salvation was in the air, and Jesus was about to usher in the end of the age and soon they would be sitting on seats of gold in the heavenly courts. The crowds followed Jesus because they wanted this Messiah to fix their lives, now – “Heal me, Jesus,” they cried out. “End my poverty, fill my empty stomach, bring me justice at last.”
They listened to his words about small things and nodded in recognition but at the same time they chomped at the bit because they were ready for the big things to happen today.

Like the crowds and like the disciples, we too follow Jesus because we believe that he can heal us of our wounds, that he can mend broken lives and reshape our society into a place of peace and justice. This is after all, what he came preaching: “The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor… and recovery of sight for the blind,” he said. Who can blame us, then, for having such high expectations about what will be accomplished if we hitch our wagons to Jesus? From that day over two thousand years ago when the disciples pumped their fists in expectation of the glorious revolution that was about to occur down to today when we throw ourselves enthusiastically into ending hunger by 2010, we listen to Jesus’ reminders about the value of small starts and then we rush away anxious to get to the finish line. We are like the child who worked all day alongside his father planting young carrot plants, who two days later, yanked all of those tender plants back out of the ground to see if they had developed any carrots yet.

Patience is not one of our best skills.

Maybe the problem is that Jesus was just going against human nature when he asked us to have faith in the yeast and in the mustard seed. Psychologists have documented that people perform better when they can see the goal line. It’s harder for us to stay motivated when the goals are so far off that they are feel too impossible to reach. We like to know that there is a purpose in what we are doing and the excitement that we might accomplish something big can drive us more than the mundane grueling process of getting there does.
I was chatting recently with a woman about unfulfilled dreams, those things in life that we always wished to do but haven’t yet achieved. This woman is an avid swimmer and she said that it has always been her dream to swim across Long Island Sound. I asked her, “Have you ever tried?” and she said, “Yes, I tried once, but I was only able to get halfway there before I had to turn back.”

“But if you got halfway and then swam all the way back,” I said, “isn’t that the same distance as swimming the entire thing? So in a sense you have swum across Long Island Sound,” I reasoned.

She just shook her head in bemusement at my silly thinking. “It’s not the same thing at all,” she declared.

We all know exactly how she feels. Which makes the more satisfying boast? “I once swam across Long Island Sound” or “I once swam as many strokes as it would take to get across Long Island Sound?” The image isn’t nearly as compelling. The problem with seeds, and yeast, and small steps on the journey is that most of us are not excited by saplings, or dough, or even by the path itself. We want to get to the goal – we want to get to the other side of Long Island Sound; we want to get to the summit; we want to eat the bread or rest in the shade of the tree. We want to get to the finish line where we can turn around and be able to say, “There, that is done. I have healed the sick, fed all the hungry, and established peace in the world. Now I can rest.”

But if Jesus was going against human nature in expecting us to focus on the small steps instead of the goal line, that is nothing new: he was always asking us to go against human nature! I seem to remember him asking to forgive more times than most of us naturally want to forgive and didn’t he tell us to pray for our enemies when we would rather obtain vengeance? He expected us to welcome people into our lives even when they offend us or give us the willies, and he thought it would be good for us to give away our money to others instead of putting it aside to protect our own future like we all want to do. Jesus seemed to believe that sometimes our natural inclinations are not the best guides for us to follow. “Face it,” Jesus said, “you just don’t always know what is best for you, but God does. Sometimes you need to listen to God instead of your own inclinations.”

And so here, in the parable of the yeast, Jesus attempted to turn our eyes away from some glorious future and tell us to focus on the present and on what we can do right here and right now in our own small ways. Did you notice that in this parable, Jesus never even mentions the bread. Listen again: he says, “The Kingdom of God is like yeast that a woman took and mixed into a large amount of flour until it worked all through the dough.” We are already smelling the bread while Jesus is trying to get us to focus on the yeast. “Concentrate on the small steps that you can take to help bring God’s vision into reality” Jesus said, “and leave the baking to God.”

I said at the beginning of this sermon that watching yeast rise is something that we have been doing for thousands of years, but there is one difference between the yeast of Jesus’ time and that of ours that we should keep in mind as we listen to this parable. The yeast that the woman leavened into that dough was not something out of a jar that she bought at the local grocery store. Like the sourdoughs of today, the yeast culture that the woman used was one that had been carefully maintained over years, perhaps generations. Each time a person mixed up a new batch of dough, a small bit of it was set aside to be used as starter dough for the next batch and as long as the yeast in that dough was kept warm and fed, it would remain healthy and stable indefinitely. Jesus’ listeners knew that the yeast the woman used in his story was yeast that had been passed on to her by those who had gone before and that she in turn would nurture and maintain for the next generation to come.

So too, we are called by Christ to leaven our world with acts of compassion and works of justice for others, to receive the gospel from those who have gone before us and, then, in our own small and persistent ways, to nurture that gospel of peace and love and maintain it for those who will come after us to carry it on when we are gone.

And we are to try very hard to leave the baking up to God.